


Night

by divapilot



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 12:41:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6566584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divapilot/pseuds/divapilot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey muses about what might exist beyond the horizon of her world and deep into the stars that shine down on her at night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night

The girl left the security of the little space she called home and walked outside. Her feet sank into the soft drifts of sand, and little shards of irritating grit slipped inside her loosely tied boots to chafe her skin. But it was worth the price. She stood still, her hand resting on the cool metal of the abandoned vehicle she lived in.

Around her she heard night sounds- some predatory animal howling far in the distance, the shifting of sands as gravity and the wind reshaped the topography. The breeze was a gentle caress, not the scouring assault that it became when the day’s heat kindles it. She lifted up her face to let the breeze blow across it, and she smiled. 

A panoply of stars looked down at her. They burned with white hot heat into the dark sky; glittering, fantastic points of light against a void-black background. No other light competed with this. Well, only the moon, but it was at its lowest point and small enough that its light was negligible. No, the night belonged to the stars.

The girl gazed at them. They didn’t fill her with wonder or a sense of awe. She was not struck with the realization that she was very small and the galaxy was very large. Instead, they were familiar lanterns, come to visit a lonely friend and keep her company through her solitary night. Sometimes she thought she could see patterns in their arrays. She imagined shapes between them: the wedge-shaped collection of stars looked like the wreckage of the star destroyer that she sometimes scavenged; the circular one looked a bit like a fat boggin. 

She stepped off the metal grate and into the soft sand, her feet sinking a little as she advanced into the darkness. The soft breeze blew her gauzy scarf, lifting the ends and curling them around her thin frame. She held her staff tightly; one never knew what new monster could pop out of the sand at any moment. But this was worth the risk. A meter or so distance from her home gave her a wider view of the brilliant sky. She tilted back her head to take in as much as she could. So many stars. Such beauty in this savage, hostile world.

She stood silently and absorbed the sight. Then, smiling to herself (as no one else was there to see it anyway), she turned and walked back through the shifting sands and onto the metal grate by the entrance to her home. She placed her hand on the side of the fallen vehicle and turned one last time to gaze at their light before shaking the sand off her feet and stepping inside to secure her home for the night. There were so many other worlds out there, but although she yearned to explore them, she knew far too well how fragile her existence was. Desires and dreams were shunted aside, drowned out by the monotony of work and the constant struggle for survival. She could not afford to gaze upward for long. For now, she would have to continue to walk the path of the hot and gritty sand. Maybe someday, in some future far beyond her current grasp, she would walk the sky.


End file.
